After the horrific events in Dallas, where at least five police officers were killed and seven more wounded at a Black Lives Matter protest against police shootings last week of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, I’m bumping up the discussion of whether LGBT activists groups and pride march organizers should work with, and give in to the demands of, Black Lives Matter anti-police activists.

“What do we want?” the crowd roared while marching in Manhattan last December. Without missing a beat, the protesters answered their own question: “Dead cops.”

Here’s the addendum I had put at the end of the prior post:
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Black Lives Matter Toronto staged a sit-in during the city’s July 2 Pride march, halting the procession for 30 minutes before organizers signed a list of demands, including “A commitment to increase representation among Pride Toronto staffing/hiring, prioritizing black trans women” among others, and, more ominously, “Removal of police floats in the pride marches/parades.”

Global News reports that despite the pledge to “purge the parade of police marchers,” that “Officers will still be present to enforce security at future parades.”

Via The Star, “Police also wouldn’t be allowed to have booths at future Pride celebrations, if the demands are met.” Inclusion!

If you thought blackmailing gays was a thing of the past, you didn’t reckon with BLM. … It so typifies 2016 that the ones to shut down a gay pride parade would be on the Left, and that no one would tell them off.

Gay groups honored Black Lives Matter with prominent roles at their pride events, and Black Lives Matter returned the favor by hijacking those events to further their own anti-cop agendas. Condemning the police as an inherently racist, homophobic institution is not only false and counterproductive, it denigrates the many LGBT officers whose participation in these festivities would be annulled if the activists got their way.

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Embracing BLM was never a good idea. But as I’ve noted before, now that gay legal equality in the U.S. has been achieved, LGBT left-progressive activists are looking for new causes, and recruiting LGBT battalions in the fight for the progressive agenda is increasingly their mission.

FurtherMore. Addressing the jihadist-driven mass murder of gay people in Orlando, Black Lives Matter’s website says “Homegrown terror is the product of a long history of colonialism…white supremacy and capitalism, which deforms the spirit and fuels interpersonal violence.” Oh.

24 Comments for “Cop Lives Matter”

After the horrific events in Dallas, where at least seven police officers were gunned down, I’m bumping up the discussion of whether LGBT activists groups and pride march organizers should work with, and give in to the demands of, Black Lives Matter anti-police activists.

The point of BLM is not to say that other lives don’t matter. Its certainly not a justification for vigilante violence.

The point of BLM is to address and fix certainly problems with the criminal justice system. Problems that left many people with the impression that the criminal justice system treated black lives as expendable.

Now LGBT African Americans have probably experienced some of the problems that BLM seeks to address.
Maybe that is why city pride parades didn’t toss black people (and their concerns) under a bus.

Now not every one running BML groups has training or experience in how to build and maintain coalitions.

Id say that quite a few gay activists in the 1970s and 1980s were also untrained in the complexity and nuance of American politics.

Saying that “all lives matter” ain’t racist. Its warm and fuzzy in a Disney sort of way. I like Disney. yet, It just sort of comes off like somone don’t want to address the concerns of black Americans.

BLM was having a peaceful protest last night. Protesters were even taking selfies of themselves with the police at the event. They didn’t call for nor are they responsible for any officers being shot. They didn’t call for or encourage violence. Dallas, it should be noted, has changed the way it handles interactions with suspects which has led to fewer instances of police discharging their weapons. It’s a good program and has gotten good results for the police here. All that work may have been undone by three shooters. BLM has already denounced the shooting. But I see that the right is quick to pin this on them anyway.

That is just pure BS Stephen. Yes, significant progress has been made, but we can still be fired for being gay in many parts of the country. We can’t even get a birthday cake made in some places for christ sake.

But as I’ve noted before, now that gay legal equality in the U.S. has been achieved, LGBT left-progressive activists are looking for new causes, and recruiting LGBT battalions in the fight for the progressive agenda is increasingly their mission.

Uh huh.

The last time I checked, we were still working down the “homosexual agenda” items that we were working on two decades ago — working for equal treatment in employment, housing and public accommodations laws, protecting gay and lesbian kids from bullying in public schools, reducing the underlying causes of high teen suicide rates and homelessness rates among gay and lesbian kids, working to reduce anti-gay violent crime, fighting to eliminate discrimination in adoption and foster parenting, and so on.

We’ve knocked marriage equality off the list, and we’ve obtained the right to serve openly in the military. So we’ve made two big gains. But the idea that “gay legal equality in the U.S. has been achieved” is ludicrous.

Legal equality continues to elude us. Gays and lesbians can be fired because of their sexual orientation in a majority of states. Gays and lesbians can be denied equal access to housing because of their sexual orientation in a majority of states. Gays and lesbians are not protected by public accommodations laws in a majority of states. Gays and lesbians are not protected against credit discrimination in a majority of states. Adoption and foster parenting by gays and lesbians is restricted in many states. And so on. The list is long, and the fight for legal equality won’t be over for years and years.

The significant legal gains we’ve made (marriage, military service, non-discrimination laws in some localities and states, federal executive orders and regulatory decisions) are under broad-scale attack at both the federal (e.g. FADA) and state levels, driven by a coalition of conservative Christians and social conservative politicians from one of the two major political parties.

The fight for legal equality is a long way from over, Stephen.

But I guess that the new homocon meme is to declare “Mission Accomplished!”, deriding gays and lesbians who continue to seek “equal means equal”. Why am I not surprised?

Y’know, there’s a decent argument about how LGBT orgs should be more single-issue and not wade into other arenas. As Barney Frank used to say, we should be more like the NRA.

But frankly you can’t talk about Dallas without talking about Minnesota. Fact is, last year cops killed over a thousand people. In the same time period, only 130 cops died. Of those, the three biggest groups are gunfire (39), automobile accident (27) and heart attack (17).

Cops kill a magnitude more folks then get killed.

So yes, killing cops is bad. But if we’re going to talk societal trends and not individual cases, then we have to talk about cops killing too.

The NRA is no longer single-minded. The NRA Political Victory Fund has now begun general attack ads of Democratic candidates, ads that have nothing to do with gun issues. We can write the NRA off as a model.

It should also be noted that the number of police officers killed in the line of duty has been decreasing for decades now. Yes, it’s terrible that it happens at all, but if some right wing relative tries to make it sound like it’s on the rise, show them the numbers.

I was mostly silent on Facebook early yesterday and the few days before when some of my actively posting African American Facebook friends were posting their upset over two widely publicized police shooting deaths of African American men. They posted with passions and with their reasoning. Also stated was the view that–hmm–the need for such passions, the need to hold such views, should be to all onlookers at that very moment.

I did post a link to an article on President Obama’s reflections on those shooting deaths (which I respected), and made the following comment: “Just because one has proof of a social trend existing does not mean that one understands it for what it truly is.
We have lost many opportunities for people forgetting this.”

I also posted a poster highlighting a fundamental exchange between the two main characters in the movie Doubt, centering around the line delivered by Meryl Streep: “When you take a step to address wrongdoing, you are taking a step away from God, but in His service.” This time, I identify far more with moral purity than with pursuing justice. But the fact that there are times I would choose the former is one of the minor reasons I chose to stay silent.

It is easier to write my opinion with frankness here than on social media, and I consider that a temptation toward what is wrong. So I posted my discomfort at how, just the day before, I had posted an argument that the ability to engage in a duel, in lethal combat against someone, created a measure of social order against wrongs between one man and another; and then hours later five police officers were killed by a black racist.

And I posted as well the following observation:

“In my humble opinion, the settling of a dispute between citizens and government powers by engaging in personal combat…
Well, first of all, I do think it settles the dispute.
And second, I think it cheapens the complaint by making it a conflict between two equals and removing the taint of suspicion from the government.”

And I shall post something else as well: the editorial of today’s Daily News, which argues that one of the police shootings was clearly outrageous and reflects racism, because while I agree that it was more likely than not racial on the officer’s part, based on the evidence that paper cites from the video (which I have not watched)… I believe it is more likely than not that the shooting was justified and that no crime occurred. And I will not explain how I come to this conclusion.

Hmm, “justified” implies a moral rather than a legal judgment. Make it “excusable.”

After the horrific events in Dallas, where at least five police officers were killed and seven more wounded at a Black Lives Matter protest against police shootings last week of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, I’m bumping up the discussion of whether LGBT activists groups and pride march organizers should work with, and give in to the demands of, Black Lives Matter anti-police activists.

mmm.

I fundamentally disagree with Houndentenor’s view that BLM is not responsible for the officers being shot. Odd, we’re usually on opposite sides on this sort of argument.

I think the benefits of the LGBT rights movement and the BLM movement aligning with each other outweigh the harms. I do not wish to feel forced to choose between being gay and being not-black. There are many whose cry is that of feeling forced to choose between being gay and being black. Call it a public health rationale: you get more socially and psychologically healthy people by creating shared safe spaces than you lose through the unpleasant consequences.

Don’t let the culture wars draw you into false binaries. One can quite reasonably be upset that black men were killed by police officers unnecessarily AND be upset that police officers were murdered. There is no either/or here. None of those deaths are in any way justified. So the conversation now needs to be what do we do so that events like Orlando and Dallas and so many others don’t happen or at least don’t happen so often. I’m wondering if we just shouldn’t leave all the flags at half mast for the foreseeable future since some mass shooting seems to happen almost weekly. Is that the country we want to live in?

The third way always seems to point toward some sort of self-effacement.

I often say that in my job it is often very effective to act based on what everyone agrees to, and to leave things that are disagreed on off to the side. Sometimes you have to act based on facts or values that are in dispute. Naming the dispute creates conditions for being defeated and disproven. It takes the power away from the dispute and from yourself and gives it to the other person.

Giving power to people you disagree with is good science and good government. It isn’t good politics.

I’m wondering if we just shouldn’t leave all the flags at half mast for the foreseeable future since some mass shooting seems to happen almost weekly. Is that the country we want to live in?

I don’t suppose any of us want to live in a world where mass shootings are as common as they are, but it is the world that we do live in, and I don’t think that it is going to change.

I think we need to come to the realization that mass shootings, like the otherwise high levels of firearms deaths (relative to the rest of the world), are a fact of American life, and will continue to be a fact of life going forward. I don’t like that conclusion, but I don’t see an alternative.

Mass shootings are the result of technological advances in weaponry, and the standard nostrums (ban sales of assault weapons and/or high-capacity clips, universal background checks, citizen carry, threat/profile monitoring) are not going to do much, if anything, to reduce either the number of mass shooting or the relatively high number of firearms deaths.

Let’s go through the nostrums, one by one:

(1) Ban Sales of Assault Weapons and/or High-Capacity Clips. At this point, such bans are a case of closing the barn door after the horse is gone. The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act expired in 2004, and in the decade since, sales of assault weapons (that is, for definitional purposes, rapid-firing semiautomatic firearms that accept detachable large-capacity magazines) skyrocketed. Conservative estimates (social science, with its emphasis on verifiable indexes, naturally tends toward undercounting) suggest that somewhere in the range of 15-35 million assault weapons are now in civilian hands in the United States. (The range in estimates is definitional; lower estimates are confined to AK, HK, and SKS “military looking” weapons, while higher estimates include all “modern sporting rifles” that meet the rapid-fire, semi-automatic, large-capacity definition.) Given the constitution and practical considerations, that cat is not going back into the bag. The United States will have more than a sufficient number of assault weapons floating around civilian hands to support current levels of mass shooting for at least the next 25-50 years (given loss, damage and confiscation rates), even if a total ban on new sales were put in place this year and rigorously enforced going forward.

(2) Universal Background Checks. While I support universal background checks (better to screen out obvious problems than do nothing at all), I also recognize that the checks are ineffective as a means to stop or reduce the number of mass shootings. Background checks do not pick up “model citizens” like the Dallas shooter and the Orlando shooter, do not effectively screen for mental illness and cannot do so without unconstitutional invasions of privacy, do not screen for intent (for example, the Orlando shooter purchased for the express purpose of carrying out an assault), and are not predictive (that is, today’s perfectly sane “model citizen” may or may not remain either sane or a model citizen).

(3) Citizen Carry. The idea that citizen carry will stop or reduce mass shootings is a case of “if wishes were horses”. No evidence exists that citizen carry will stop or reduce mass shootings, and available evidence points the other way. In cases in which citizens were carrying (e.g. the Giffords shooting), no effective response was mounted by armed civilians. Even in cases where trained police officers were on hand and responded (e.g. the Orlando shooting, with three officers on hand engaging the shooter, and the Dallas shooting, in which a large number of officers were on hand), the response did not stop the killing. The reason for this is obvious. Mass shooters are prepared (the shooters in Orlando and Dallas were both heavily armed and wearing body armor), select the target and seize the initiative, and typically complete the task of killing within the first several minutes of the incident. Civilians carrying are almost certain to be taken by surprise, confused and hesitant (even trained police officers and military personnel are reluctant to kill and will almost always flinch in first encounters; a great deal of “live fire” and combat training is devoted to overcoming this deficiency). Typical civilian weapons (e.g. 9 mm and 38 SP small frame pistols/revolvers) are ineffective against body armor, inaccurate beyond a short distance, and civilians taken by surprise are unlikely to effectively sort out a confusing situation quickly enough to make a difference. Few civilians are or would be willing to undergo the level of training to develop skills necessary to be effective in a mass shooting situation, and to keep that training up over the course of years.

(4) Threat/Profile Monitoring. Threat/profile monitoring is an essential tool in prevention of terrorist attacks, and is (at least to some extent) effective in preventing terrorist mass shootings. The number of terrorist mass shootings is no doubt lower than it would otherwise be if our intelligence services did not monitor and profile. But with respect to the bulk of mass shootings, shootings carried out by citizens not directed by terrorist organizations, threat/profile monitoring is likely to be close to useless unless Americans are willing to accept invasive monitoring as a way of life, and change the Constitution to allow such monitoring. We are developing the capacity in which effective monitoring/profiling is possible, but is that (a world in which every e-mail and social media exchange, our movements, and so on, are government-analized) worth it, just to stop a relatively few mass shootings?

I used the term “relatively few mass shootings” for a reason. Mother Jones has created a reasonably good database of mass shootings in the United States since 1982. The database excludes shootings stemming from more conventional crimes such as armed robbery or gang violence. During the period 1982-2016 (though Orlando) 668 persons were killed in mass shootings. That is not a high number relative to the number of gun-related deaths overall, and the number of people killed in mass shootings is miniscule in relation to the population of the United States.

We accept the number of gun-related deaths overall in this country. To the extent that we think about it, most of us don’t like it. But we accept it. I think that we have to accept the number of deaths from mass shootings, as well. We have created a situation which we cannot now undo.

I don’t like that conclusion. It goes against my grain. But I think that it is the only conclusion possible at this point.

I think most mass shooters come from a family background that does not include firearms, so I think this will be partially effective. Forcing people to trade their existing assault weapons for non-assault weapons would be even more effective. That is not politically feasible in any non-liberal state, much less nationally.

(2) Universal Background Checks.

That was harsh.

(3) Citizen Carry.
…
Mass shooters are prepared (the shooters in Orlando and Dallas were both heavily armed and wearing body armor), select the target and seize the initiative, and typically complete the task of killing within the first several minutes of the incident.

A lot of mass shooters give up when they meet police resistance, though.

I think we can work with citizen carry in theory. England used to require all able-bodied adults to not just own the longbow, but to practice with it regularly. We can require civilians to do the same training. But most people would rather accept the current frequency of mass shootings. I certainly think this country will have to be much worse off before creating citizen militias becomes more helpful than dangerous.

(even trained police officers and military personnel are reluctant to kill and will almost always flinch in first encounters; a great deal of “live fire” and combat training is devoted to overcoming this deficiency).

Let’s see what they come up with in the final draft. The news reports I’ve been reading strongly suggest that we’ll see 2012’s platform doubled down and amplified. Digging the hole deeper, in my opinion.

The platform committee also voted against adding language specifically mentioning the LGBT community as a target of radical Islamic terrorism.

The platform reads: “Radical Islamic terrorism poses an existential threat to personal freedom and peace around the world.” The committee struck down adding “LGBT individuals in particular have been a target of violence and oppression.”

So much for the argument that Republicans (despite all else) should get the gay/lesbian vote because ISIS.

If they put in that language, they’d have to put in language about women, blacks, etc., and Republicans don’t believe in laundry list politics in the first place.

Really? Republicans think that ISIS throws women and blacks off the tops of buildings, too? Wow. Didn’t know that …

The language that was refused was “LGBT individuals in particular have been a target of violence and oppression.” That’s true, or at least it has been a constant Republican talking point ad nauseam. Even The President Presumptive has been hawking it. When push came to shove at the platform committee, that talking point just didn’t cut it, I guess.

Really? Republicans think that ISIS throws women and blacks off the tops of buildings, too? Wow. Didn’t know that …

You don’t usually fall for cheap strawmen, Tom.

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IGF CultureWatch is a blog that originated with the Independent Gay Forum, a group of writers and activists who focused on advancing gay and lesbian legal equality and social inclusion beyond ideological rigidity and leftwing orthodoxy. more